The long-term impact of the Education Maintenance Allowance

This project will investigate whether the Education Maintenance Allowance (EMA) has long-term benefits for young people and provide evidence to assess its value for money as a policy.

The EMA is a government programme that pays 16- to 19-year-olds from low-income families up to £30 a week for staying in education. It was introduced in 2004 and still operates in its original form in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. In England, the scheme closed in 2011.

Previous research has found that EMA increases post-16 education participation and reduces youth crime. It is not known, however, whether this has translated into higher educational attainment, better labour market outcomes, or lower rates of criminal involvement in adulthood.

This study will look at the effects of the EMA programme up to age 30 and examine how these effects vary by prior educational attainment, gender, ethnicity and geography. The researchers will distinguish between students who remained in education because of EMA, and those who would have stayed in education even without EMA.

The team will also explore whether EMA’s longer-term effects can be explained by:

• Reduced part-time work during study (for educational outcomes)
• The importance of additional qualifications gained (for labour market outcomes)
• Reductions in youth crime (for reductions in later-life offending).

Finally, they will carry out a cost-benefit analysis of EMA. This will involve projecting likely effects on lifetime earnings, employment and offending, then calculating tax payments and estimating benefit receipts.

The research findings are expected to be of particular interest to the Labour Party, which has consistently called for EMA to be reinstated, as well as to policymakers in the devolved nations and all developed countries considering conditional cash transfer schemes.

The study could also be a useful example to inform future approaches to policy evaluation design, by examining the longer-term outcomes of a scheme known to have short-term benefits.

The findings will be published as an open-access report available on this page. The launch event will be broadcast online, and viewers will be able to ask questions.